How do you produce some of the world's most advanced and mind-blowing digital animation? Communally, in the deep woods, part-time, after the goat has been milked.

Five earnest faces around a communal dinner. There are black beans and fresh guacamole, organic veggies with South Asian spices, delicious homemade banana-and-corn-flour tortillas fresh from the skillet. Everyone has in front of them a big glass of milk, harvested about an hour ago from the nanny goat — Mrs. Winterberry — then flash-cooled in a metal bucket of ice, something they learned about on the Internet, as they have all manner of things, including forestry, horticulture, voluntary simplicity, positive psychology, worm farming, evolutionary biology, wastewater treatment, and indigenous Aloni Indian saw-grass habitats. From the Web they also gleaned the knowledge it took to design and build their own 3-D camera display rig, used to create breathtaking films and videos, especially their award-winning, seven-minute music video for Björk, the hot ticket last year at Saatchi & Saatchi's New Directors' Showcase; fawning critics called it epic. Deploying the full range of cinematic psychedelia — outlandish puppetry, inventive costuming, scale modeling, stop-motion, CGI, live action — "Wanderlust" featured the ethereal-voiced Icelandic performance artist riding a fanciful water creature through a kaleidoscopic landscape of mountains and rushing rivers on the way to meet the Rivergod. It seems there is nothing this trio of Next Age renaissance kids, known collectively as Encyclopedia Pictura, can't teach themselves how to do.

The house is large and hexagonal, full of odd stairways and cubbyholes, little half floors and observation spots, all of it conceived and executed by the hippie daughter of an esteemed geologist who bought the land many years ago as a place to retire and raise orchids — a total of twenty sun-dappled acres of redwood forest, oak woodlands, fruit trees, and food forest gardens in the Santa Cruz mountains, about an hour south of San Jose, California. To conserve electricity, only a single light in the dining room is lit. There is much talk here at Trout Gulch, without irony, about being right-sized, about treading softly, about leaving a small footprint on the earth (while simultaneously endeavoring to leave huge and revolutionary footprints all over the histories of art, entertainment, and social philosophy). By going totally digital, EP hopes to eliminate the waste left by creating physical models with nonrenewable materials. Headquartering everyone together in an energy-efficient setting, they say, helps keep carbon-dioxide-producing activities like travel to a minimum. (They carefully monitor their carbon footprint.)

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The table is a rectangle. Candles burn in a shrine to a Hindu-looking deity. Hypnotic Balinese gamelan music plays on a circa-1970s component stereo. A cardboard box full of quartz crystals glows with the orange light of the sun setting over the prickly, timber-clad ridge. In attendance tonight are four males, a female, and a red-spectacled Amazon parrot. Everyone gathered has a freshly showered look, wet hair, and sunburned noses; they spent the day laboring in the late-summer heat, building an outdoor kitchen. A thirty-year plan is already in effect, based on the principles of permaculture, sustainable communities, infinite possibilities. They'd like to purchase the rest of the parcel — Grandpa's house and acreage — in order to create a back-to-the-land version of Walt Disney Studios or Lucasfilm, complete with individual habitats, zip lines, and highly advanced digital-filmmaking technology, a "mythological and magically inspiring place that isn't synthetic and fake, built with living things and populated with real people," according to Isaiah Saxon, the undisputed center of the triumvirate, first among equals. Their immediate goal is to feed and house the roughly twenty computer artists it will take to produce their next project — a full-length IMAX 3-D movie.

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Saxon, twenty-six, majored in film directing at San Francisco's Academy of Art University. He is the son of the meditation teacher who built the house (and who still lives here on the land, along with a contingent of seven grown-ups, including a college professor, a former Navy SEAL/stone mason, and a hippie plumber with his wife and son, known collectively as the "Boomers"). Tallish and poetic with a wispy beard and surfer's pecs — the Pacific Ocean is only a ten-minute drive — Saxon wears fey rimless glasses over incandescent blue eyes; his feet are dirty, one toenail is missing, there is a deep gash on his instep that looks painful. Moving about the property in his distracted barefoot saunter, past the myriad projects and ghosts of projects yet started or finished, he brings to mind the Harrison Ford character in The Mosquito Coast, a starry-eyed utopian with only the best intentions, his mind awash with a million plans to help the world.

I ask how EP — known in the recent past for their psilocybin-influenced music videos for Seventeen Evergreen and Grizzly Bear — chose the name for its production collaborative.

"We made a list and that's the one we liked most?" Saxon says haltingly, ruefully, his northern-California upspeak turning his statement into a question. He grimaces; clearly he does not wish to sound like the leader of a garage band. "I think sort of what it reflects was that our interest in visual communication was broad. It wasn't, like, just about film? We wanted something that could grow with us if things went according to plan and we got more and more opportunities in, like, all the spaces we'd like to be involved with. That name just reflected sort of our appreciation for the image in general. The bottom line is, we're about images."

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Looking for more, I turn to Daren Rabinovitch, thirty-one. He has dark hair, a thick black beard, and oversized tortoiseshell glasses. After majoring in sculpture at Academy of Art, he became a model maker — stop-motion puppets, scale models, fabrication, painting — building effects for Disney and Industrial Light and Magic, working on such movies as Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Saxon e-mailed Rabinovitch after reading about him on a Web site called Fecal Face. It turned out he'd attended the local public school in Aptos with Saxon's older brother and sister, both of whom grew up to become full-time political activists.

"Actually, Daren wasn't part of things when we named it." This is Sean Hellfritsch, twenty-six. Compact and clean shaven, quietly intense, a devoted mat surfer, he lives in a two-story tree fort that can be seen out the kitchen window. Tonight he is wearing a red union suit and a pair of thrift-store pants. Another child of hippie parents, he was homeschooled until junior high, where he met Saxon. His family lived seven miles up a canyon. Intense and introspective, he spent much of his youth alone in the woods or around the house, taking apart and building electronics, rewiring the home stereo, making Lego spaceships. Given a video camera in sixth grade, he never looked back. After receiving an associate's degree in film and video production from a Florida media-arts school, he knocked around the Los Angeles film scene for a time before returning north to San Francisco, where he reconnected with Saxon.

The two conceived EP in 2004. For several years they lived in a group house in the Mission District with seven other artists and musicians. Rabinovitch came on in 2007. The trio moved back to Trout Gulch last August, after nine months in New York working on "Wanderlust."

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"That is true," Rabinovitch concurs. "I was not part of things when you named it."

"Actually," Saxon clarifies, "we did have a second name for when we were making films with Daren."

"Mangello Tipperary," Rabinovitch says conclusively. "That was the name of this cult leader who had this community that all our parents were members of."

For several long beats, everyone at the table wears his or her most ominous expression. It's like: OMFG! He told!

Then everybody dissolves into laughter.

"He's lying!" Saxon says, voice cracking.

"You're supposed to stick to the story no matter what, remember?" This is Uriah, Saxon's kid brother, nineteen. The Amazon parrot is sitting on the padded shoulder of his thrift-store sport coat. The bird seems fixated on grooming the boy's ears with his beak.

"I'm sorry, I cannot," Saxon says. He seems to be playing the role of a genius with no sense of humor, who is expected to participate in a joke. "I've already told him differently. I've already contradicted that story."

"It has been published in other areas that Mangello Tipperary was a cult leader who was like a second father to all of us," Rabinovitch points out, sounding a bit like Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Working on the outdoor kitchen today, he had about him the green-branch will of a pioneer as we mixed mud and manure (from a neighbor's stallion) and wood chips to construct a beehive-shaped, wood-burning clay oven. (When the first fire is lit, the internal wood chips will incinerate, leaving chambers that enhance insulation.) You'd want these guys with you if you were ever on Lost. Faced with the scary, hell-in-a-handbasket world as envisioned by the likes of Osama and Al Gore, their perspective seems to be something like: Let the oldsters sweat the apocalypse. We can take care of ourselves.

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"Yes, Mangello Tipperary fathered us all," deadpans Saxon.

"Isaiah!" This is Meara O'Reilly, twenty-seven. Sturdy and natural with a musical laugh, her silky double braids tied up like Princess Leia's, she is new to Trout Gulch — Saxon may or may not have stalked her at a show like an infatuated groupie when she was singing with the now-defunct band Feathers. O'Reilly studied psychoacoustics at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She performs with a large square piece of fabricated metal (called a Chladni plate) and a box of salt. When she sings different notes, the amplified sound waves cause the salt to form patterns on the metal. It's really pretty cool. On the IMAX project, she will be working with sonification issues.

"You have to watch out what you tell the media," I say, feeling paternal. "Stuff gets perpetuated. You know how the Web is — there's no fact-checking. They can say anything about you."

Saxon frowns at me like I don't get it. He said once that his perfect dinner party would include seventeenth-century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, Leonardo da Vinci, and children's-television-show host Fred Rogers. "That was sort of the idea," he explains. "To perpetuate stuff."

"You spread lore," Saxon says. His chin rises, almost imperceptibly. I get the feeling he's not kidding.

This month, Encyclopedia Pictura launches a new Web site, along with its video for the God game Spore, a new blog about the future of visual communication, and a show at Deitch Projects' Grand Street Gallery in New York. A Warp Films short about a man who attains enlightenment with the help of a fox will be out in the spring of 2010. Also in the works: an augmented-reality app for smartphones involving a visual language EP has developed and a full-length, Star Wars-esque adventure film.

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